The present invention relates generally to electronic commerce that takes place across a global computer network and more particularly to screening transactions across the Internet.
Electronic commerce offers many opportunities to market and sell products on a worldwide basis at a fraction of the cost associated with traditional sales methods. However, electronic transactions create potential problems and risks as well. As business moves swiftly to provide products and services over the Internet, there are a variety of issues that must be considered and safeguarded against.
Frequently little, if anything, is known about a customer who wishes to buy a product or service over the Internet. Still a customer must often be qualified in some way to purchase certain items. For instance, the purchase of certain types of weapons such as handguns, may require a potential customer to be screened by submitting to a background check. Implementing a transaction screening method becomes more difficult when the transaction takes place electronically.
Under Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations and equivalent non-U.S. regulations, medical devices may only be sold for use by licensed medical practitioners, or in the alternative, to authorized distributors of medical equipment. Additionally, a distribution contract may need to be in place before completing a sale. Finally, in order to sell a medical device, the device itself may have to be registered, or otherwise approved, in the country of sale. Therefore, when a sales transaction involving medical products takes place electronically, there must exist a mechanism to ensure that such equipment is not improperly sold, either to an unauthorized purchaser, or to a purchaser located in an unauthorized locale.
It would therefore be desirable to have a clearly-defined and appropriately-scoped review process that is designed to acquire the information about the potential customer necessary to ensure a proper sale of such restricted products. Further, it would be desirable for the review process to be applicable for consistent use by all components of a business, thus reducing the amount of variation associated with the electronic sales transactions. Therefore, it would be desirable to have an efficient method and system for screening a potential customer.